Professional Notes

Dr. Susan Marsnik, Ethics and Business Law Department, Opus College of Business, served on a panel discussing cultural dimension of intellectual property protection and enforcement Nov. 25, as part of the World Arbitration Forum for Intellectual Property held at Dead Sea, Jordan. She is co-author with Robert Thomas (University of Florida) of an article accepted for publication in the spring issue of the Boston College International & Comparative Law Review. The paper, “Drawing a Line in the Patent Subject Matter Sands: Does Europe Prove a Solution to the Business Method and Software Patent Problem?” earned distinction in August at the Academy of Legal Studies in Business Annual Conference as a finalist for the Holmes-Cardozo Award for excellence in legal scholarship. Over spring semester while on sabbatical, Marsnik served as a Fulbright Senior Specialist (Intellectual Property Law) in the Faculty of Law at Beni-Suef University in Egypt.

Dr. Valentine Pakis, Department of Modern and Classical Languages, College of Arts and Sciences, has enjoyed a number of noteworthy academic accomplishments in 2010. His edited anthology of scholarship on the Old Saxon Heliand – the first Anglophone anthology to be devoted to this ninth-century biblical poem – was published in May by the West Virginia University Press (Perspectives on the Old Saxon Heliand: Introductory and Critical Essays, with an Edition of the Leipzig Fragment). He has contributed to the debate concerning the influence of the Vetus Latina on the Gothic Bible with an article in the Danish philological journal NOWELE, titled “Praesens Historicum and the Question of Old Latin Influence on the Gothic Bible.” In an article of more than 30,000 words in the latest volume of Mediävistik (“Contextual Duplicity and Textual Variation: The Siren and Onocentaur in the Physiologus Tradition”), he has argued for a new and context-based philological approach to the inconsistencies of broadly disseminated textual traditions. In “Line One of Christus und die Sameriterin,” which has just appeared in the Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie, he has confronted and explicated the textual difficulties presented by the beginning of one of the oldest extant vernacular poems from medieval Germany, and his encyclopedia entries on the medieval chroniclers Johann Kerckhörder, Henning Hagen and Tilman Pluntsch were recently published in the Encyclopedia of the Medieval Chronicle (ed. Graeme Dunphy). Pakis’s review of the two-volume Die althochdeutsche und altsächische Glossographie: Ein Handbuch was published this year in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology, and his dual review of the Norwegian anthology Barlaam i Nord: Legenden om Barlaam och Josaphat i den nordiska medeltidslitteraturen and Robert Volk’s Historiae animae utilis de Barlaam et Ioasaph (spuria) appeared in the journal Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik. Pakis also has translated three short books this year – one fascinating work of post-humanities scholarship by the late media theorist Vilém Flusser (Vampyroteuthis Infernalis) and two works of fiction by the great Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard (Midland at Stilfs, Ungenach) – each of which has been submitted for publication.

James Rogers, Center for Irish Studies, was a featured speaker for a public program on Nov. 18 presented by the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas. Rogers’ lecture was titled “The Greatest Generation, Irish Style: The Midcentury Re-invention of the Irish in America.” Using examples from popular culture of the postwar period, such as Finian’s Rainbow (1947) and The Quiet Man (1952), he argued that the Irish image in American life provided a subtle critique of mainstream values.